August 25, 2011

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox parc was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley.

To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers.

A visitor to parc, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention.

If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox parc—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.